Chemical and physical properties like good electrical and thermal conductivity, chemical resistance and inertness as well as low density combined with high surface area and porosity make porous carbon materials a preferred material in a broad field of applications, such as electrodes in batteries and fuel cells, and gas adsorbents.1-3 
Ordered mesoporous carbons (OMC) have retained a lot of attention since their first synthesis in 1999, where silica templates were used as a mold.4,5 This hard-templating method is very versatile and dimensions are only limited by the availability of the silica template, but it is tedious due to multiple step synthesis and the removal of the silica template with hazardous chemicals.6-12 
The first soft-templated OMC used structure direction from the block copolymer poly(styrene)-block-poly(4-vinylpyridine) (PS-b-P4VP) with resorcinol through solvent evaporation induced self-assembly (EISA) and subsequent gas-solid reaction with gaseous formaldehyde (Liang et al., 2004). The resulting carbon thin films of up to 1 μm thickness showed hexagonally ordered cylindrical pores with a pore size of 33.7 nm after pyrolysis.
Since this first report, extensive studies on soft-templated OMCs have been performed using the surfactant-like block copolymers Pluronics®. Due to the small molar mass of these structure directing molecules, however, the accessible pore size range was limited to less than 4 nm, which was increased to 15-16 nm by molecular swelling agents, as well as by using carbon onions or carbon black additives.14-17 Only a few reports on the use of block copolymers with molar masses up to 45.6 kDa for the synthesis of OMCs with larger pore sizes were published.18-21 
Pore sizes up to 37 nm have been achieved using poly(styrene)-block-poly(ethylene oxide) (PS-PEO) with poly(styrene) homopolymer addition as pore expander and phenolic resols as the carbon precursors.23 The mesostructures achieved with these polymers were inverse micellar and hexagonally packed cylinders. Ordered, bicontinuous networks, such as gyroidal mesoporous carbons, have only been reported using Pluronics®, and recently using the structure directing block copolymer poly(ethylene oxide)-block-poly(ε-caprolactone) (PEO-b-PCL).15,22 However, the reported material showed only a small pore size of 11 nm and low porosity.
The present invention is directed to overcoming these and other deficiencies in the art.